Greens and Cabinet gender equality

The Green Party is today announcing that, in Government, it will ensure half of all Green Cabinet Ministers are women, and will call on other members of any coalition Government it is involved in to do the same.

Green Party Co-leader James Shaw announced to the CTU conference in Wellington today that the Green Party would put gender equality at the heart of any Government it is involved in, starting with equal representation in Cabinet.

“Our hope is that by leading by example, and ensuring gender equality at the Cabinet table, the Green Party can stimulate and support a wave of gender equity reforms for women who work,” Mr Shaw said.

“A Government with 70 percent of its Ministers men isn’t good for women and it isn’t good for New Zealand.

“By committing to a gender balance in Cabinet, the Green Party won’t immediately fix the inequalities women are forced to deal with at work every day, but it will show that we are committed to gender equality everywhere, starting with where we work ourselves,” Mr Shaw said.

I don’t know how much priority the Greens will put on this policy in coalition negotiations.

The Greens haven’t achieved gender equality in their own caucus. They campaigned on having a line up dominated by females, and have ended up with two male MPs and six female MPs.

In contrast NZ First is slanted the other way, with two female MPs to seven male MPs, so I guess there is balance between the two of them.

Labour have more female MPs this time ( I count 21 of their 46 MPs as female), but most of their experienced MPs likely to fill Cabinet positions are male. Three of their top ten MPs are female, and just seven of their top twenty.

So gender balance in a Labour-NZ First-Green government would be difficult to achieve.

34 Comments

David

It looks like we may have a female PM and alongside the chief justice and the governor general and the Queen we are suffering a terribly embarrasing gender imbalance already, our head spook is a woman too its just all getting a bit out of hand and I look forward to Shaw making this part of the coalition deal.

Joe Bloggs

Rather than whining like a mosquito about embarrassment, why don’t you use your privilege to begin to pursue a just world, challenging the assumptions about who’s benign and who’s competent.

You could always leverage those straight, white advantages to provide access to those who don’t yet enjoy it, and to help confront the prejudices of race, gender identity and expression, ability, and sexual orientation that many in our culture take for granted…. or is social justice an alien concept to you?

Kevin

Conspiratoor

This is good stuff. We need all genders given due recognition. I’m referring to all those who class themselves as neither men nor women. Now im not up with the names of all these various genders but in the spirit of enforcing equality for all let’s give em all a spot at the trough.

In fact I’m thinking I feel better about myself if hitherto I become an aethergender– A gender that feels very wide, commanding, breathtaking and powerful.

Blazer

Trevors_elbow

Oh please go find a mirror and have a good look…. mind you, you may blind yourself with your own self proclaimed brilliance….

For specialist portfolios like health being from that sector is an advantage in some ways but is a hindrance in many others (sector capture etc )
… which you of course would understand. Sometimes the outsider viewpoint is necessary to shift entrenched thinking

Joe Bloggs

In other words, you’ve defined the abilities and experiences of women against the standard of able white, heterosexual, cis-gender males, and from which any deviation is viewed as a defect.

In your world everyone else always has to be aware of that which they “lack,” having to exert extraordinary amounts of energy proving they can compensate for the deficit, make it a non-factor. They get no benefit of the doubt:

– Black men have to “prove” that they’re not a threat on the street.

– Women have to work “twice as hard” as any man to prove their competence on the job.

– LGBTQ people have to “prove” that they’re not deviants, whose very presence is threatening to children or women in bathrooms.

Gezza

Alan Wilkinson

How very 70s. If women don’t want to make the commitment of time and the extra work and stress of being a minister, will they be forced to by Mr Shaw ?

The oldie about women needing to be twice as good etc wasn’t true in the 70s and it’s not true now-it’s a sweeping generalisation. It certainly hasn’t been the case anywhere that I have worked or heard of.How can someone always work twice as hard in a shop or office where everyone’s doing the same work ?

Blazer

Fight4NZ

Your’re right, it isn’t really true. Almost all the women in the many offices I have worked in or visited could work 3, 4 or 5 times harder than the men and still have absolutely no chance of displacing the default privileged right-wing white old boys whose sense of entitlement vastly out-weighed their competence and effort combined. That’s why all NZs biggest companies have failed over the years – the last remnant of Fletchers floundering under the weight of the ‘experienced’ management elite it props up as we speak. And the funny thing is, despite this appalling track record, they think they are the only ones qualified to tell everyone else how to run the country.